There are many fundamentals that are stressed in the game of basketball. Box out. Play defense with your feet not with your hands. Follow your shot. Don’t be a diver. But perhaps the most critical of all these is: Make your free throws.

Not that free throw shooting is necessarily more fundamental than the others, but it is certainly the most noticeable. No one has ever said after a game-winning shot, “Man, the defender didn’t move his feet well enough there.”

Free throw shooting at the end of the game in particular is one of the most stressful moments in all of sports. Very rarely are all eyes on one player with the outcome of the game hanging in the balance and the rest of the team unable to do anything but watch. It is for that reason that free throws are so crucial. Memphis learned that lesson the hard way.

With the Tigers up four and under a minute and a half to play, Memphis proceeded to miss four out of five free throws at the end of regulation, leaving the door open for Mario Chalmers’ heroics. Was it a choke job? Probably. But, to be fair to Memphis, let’s look at this from a mathematical stand point.

The Law of Large Numbers says that, in the long run, things will act they way you expect them to. For example, if you fill a coin a million times, it will come up heads pretty close to 50% of the time. The general rule of thumb is that if you need 30 trials to use this theorem. On Monday night, we only needed 19.

Entering the NCAA Title game, Memphis had shot 61.4% from the free throw line as a team. In the final game, they shot about 63.2% - right at their average.

Before missing those four free throws down the stretch, they had been 9-12, 75%. But, when given enough attempts, the Law of Large Numbers says Memphis would end up shooting closer to 60%. And they did.

You could say Memphis choked, and you would probably be right. But I wouldn’t say that. I would say that the Tigers were always poor free throw shooters, but it just manifested itself at the worst possible time.